Tonight was the first time since Liz Truss’s 49-day premiership that voters got to have their say on exactly what happened back in 2022, and what’s happened since. The verdict is in: Truss has suffered a devastating defeat in South West Norfolk, going from a 25,000 seat majority in 2019 (one of the safest Tory seats in the country) to losing to Labour candidate Terry Jermy, with a difference of just over 600 votes. The 26 per cent voter swing from Tories to Labour made Truss the first former prime minister to lose their seat in almost 90 years.
Were this any other MP, it would be easy to chalk up the result to the insurgence of Reform, which secured 9,958 votes – not far off Truss’s 11,217. But this is not a normal case. Truss may have been the most-mentioned MP in this election, as Labour used her brief stint in Downing Street to repeatedly attack the Tory party for economic incompetence.
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